It's Emily Cooper's World, We're Just Living In It.
The beautiful ecstasy of both the worst and best show on television.
This has been, without a doubt, the coldest winter I can remember.
Now, I can chalk this up to the fact that I wear loafers everywhere I go, or my slow realization that corduroy isn’t as insulating as I thought it was. But poor sartorial choices aside, I think much of the blame lies in our apartment, a baby blue Victorian that will be celebrating its 120th birthday next year. It looks pretty good for 120 years old! It’s the Helen Mirren of antique San Francisco three bedrooms, if you will.
The heating, however, is a different story. Freezing as I head to bed, and freezing when I wake up, I decided to come back to my folk’s place for a week. Both to celebrate the holidays, and to sit wrapped in blankets staring at the fireplace for a few hours each day.
It was almost immediately after my arrival that I met Emily. As I put my bags down, headed for soak in the bath, and got out, I decided to dry off while on the couch. Suddenly, a huge advertisement appeared across the screen for a show called Emily in Paris. On it, a woman lounges across a window, looking out over a nameless arrondissement- whatever the case was, whoever she might be, her face indicated that she knew things. Like the Mona Lisa hanging in the show’s titular city, her face was neither happy nor sad, but more than anything, wistful. Obviously this was Paris, but was this Emily? If it was, perhaps she knew herself better than we ever would, as a phantom of a fabricated reality, never to leave the confines of whatever script she was destined to follow.
Like Joan of Arc, Helen of Troy, or even Brittney Spears of McComb, Mississippi, perhaps it would be behoove one to know this woman.
The third season of Emily in Paris, a lauded Netflix original, was here. On the poster, Emily wore a dress resembling cotton candy, shaped to be what someone who had never worked in haute couture thought haute couture should probably look like. The caption, above the lights of the Eiffel Tower, read: “Tourist Season Is Over.”
It seemed as if Emily knew this better than anyone. Her expression, contemplative but forlorn, said as much. As much as this line appeared to haunt Emily, it began to worm itself into my psyche, too.
Was this a positive, in the fact that Emily was slowly becoming accepted into the Parisian culture, a notoriously opaque lifestyle centered around good food and even better sex? Or was this a signifier that the dream was over, that reality was now beginning to seep in? Three seasons in, what were we to make of Emily’s fate?
Where on God’s green earth will Emily find her redemption? It surely cannot be here, in Paris, I thought.
Yet, I was determined to find out. I had to leave every single disposition I had at the door. Take my laurels, and chuck them out the window. Not every piece of media has to be a five star meal, I thought. Sometimes it’s nice to just have a little junk food.
And yet, as I would come to find out, Emily In Paris was no junk food. It was a Michelin-starred tasting menu, and I had no idea what I was getting into.
For lack of a better word, it felt as if I was being beckoned to watch Emily In Paris. In what felt like my body moving on its own, I feverishly clicked the big purple button in the center of the Roku remote. The screen turned black, then brought me to Netflix, then to Emily In Paris, the play symbol for Episode 1 emitting a warm glow.
The Faustian deal was about to go underway.
In the course of one night, I frantically binged six episodes of the first season, with my finger barely reaching the pause button before the opening for the seventh rolled around. I looked at the time. It was nearly 12AM, and I was in a neat, nearly vegetative state, watching our titular heroine bumble around the City of Lights for the last…. three and a half hours. I took a small break to go use the bathroom and make myself a cup of tea, but other than that, I was transfixed.
It was some of the most ab television I had ever had the pleasure of viewing. Gone were the class commentaries of shows like Squid Game, the Machiavellian character arcs of Breaking Bad, and the quiet nuance permeating programs like Mad Men. That last concept, in fact, seems so foreign to the show runners of Emily in Paris it’s almost refreshing. Holding the hand of the audience to explain every story beat, blatantly telling us how a character is feeling during a scene. And I loved every minute of it.
Discussing this online, a friend described the show as ‘inward schadenfreude’, a state where they are hissing at the screen more often than not. They continue watching because they have a desire to hiss more and more, an ouroboros of self-loathing, one that has become an addiction.
As for myself, I watch the show because I am simply captivated, I cannot look away, not for anything. It’s very much like being under a spell, one conjured up by network executives, board room directors, and travel influencers. Yet, the question that rings through my head as I watch, louder than any Parisian church bell ever could, is this:
Are we supposed to be rooting for Emily?
First, a little background on our protagonist, Emily Cooper: She is from the great land of Chicago, and is sent to Paris on assignment from her advertising agency, to infuse an American perspective into a once-great, still pretty good French marketing firm. This is where much of the laughs can be found- Emily fumbles her way around her new office, committing faux pas after faux pas.
Some of these scenes I invariably laugh at much too hard- why is it genuinely hilarious that a woman storms out of a boardroom the second she hears Emily speak English? We never see her again, at least not in any real context, which makes it ten times more funny.
The same attitude Emily gleefully bears in the office can be found in every romantic nook and cranny she finds herself in within the City of Lights. Her naïveté and optimism are unrelenting, coming off as antithetical to nearly every other person, and thing, on the show. A great joy of watching Emily In Paris is seeing the former nearly always lose to the latter. The girl is defeated by the city in every episode, a love letter to the unflinching nature of Paris, a dense urban metropolis that exudes many things, but most notably, the rejection of main character syndrome.
For Emily, a girl who is literally our main character, rubbing against Paris is an exercise in futility. Take that with the fact that she also carries the baggage of American exceptionalism (along with heaps of privilege) and it goes from futile to nearly impossible. It is like watching the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force. Except in this case, the immovable object (Parisian adamancy) is left without a scratch every single time the unstoppable force (Emily’s American tendencies) collides into it.
The plot armor surrounding our titular heroine I thought would come as standard in a show like this is nowhere to be found. AND I LOVE THAT! There is no redemption for Emily’s love of work (yuck) or her fashion choices (I could never.)
A few words on that, actually. You cannot talk about this show without talking about Emily’s clothes. In a brilliant collaboration between the writers room and the costume designer, both Emily and her wardrobe are cringe- to the point where I question my own taste, my own tether to reality, for enjoying them so much.
On the few trips I’ve made to Paris, either for business or pleasure, the people who I would describe as ‘best-dressed’ were the ones who showed a bit of restraint, the ones who had a speck of sartorial dignity. Not so for Emily. She is the embodiment of many fashion movements come and gone, but the one that you’ll notice most frequently is the embrace of Y2K Maximalism.
She is, however, charming enough to attract every single man in Europe it seems, a kind of conquering of the French territories and beyond. She hooks up with Gabriel, the chef, who lives downstairs and is in a pretty serious 5 year relationship. A fling with Antoine, the CEO of a perfume company, is always in will they won’t they territory, but not like, in a fun way. As I power through the second season, it seems like things are going to heat up with Alfie, the British investment banker who is too cool for school but makes a lot of money.
Knowing a few people who went down this road from high school, I can tell you, Alfie, that it is no fun. Enjoy Paris while you still have a working meat skeleton, because in the end, it’ll be the cynicism that kills you.
Which is a nice segway into the final piece I’ll add to this. It is just nice to enjoy something without being a snob, pretentious, or, as the French call it, a tête de noeud. (Think dickhead, but like, more annoying.) For my New Year’s Resolution last year, I wanted to start being less cynical. There is too much beauty in my life, and much too little time to spend it with steam coming out of my ears. It is of course a work in progress, but I’m proud of the strides I’ve made over the past few months especially.
As truly insane as it may sound, Emily In Paris is a reminder of this. This show is so strangely mesmerizing, and I would’ve never gone near it had I stuck to my old ways. It is the best and the worst show on television right now, and I respect the commitment it has to both sides of that statement.